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Hectal
Roadmap
Phase 11Intermediate14 of 19 in the curriculum

Microservices Architecture

Boundaries, discovery, resilience, sagas and the patterns that keep a fleet from eating itself.

Microservices are a networking problem with an organization problem attached. This phase covers the operational skeleton — gateway, discovery, config, sync/async communication — and then the resilience library: circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, bulkheads, sagas, outbox, idempotency and distributed locking.

Every pattern here is 'what do we do when this service is slow or down?' answered honestly.

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15 topics ~2 h 10 code blocks & diagrams
Start with the first topic
1
11.1

Monolith vs Microservices

One deployable vs many — the decision you must be able to justify BOTH ways.

6 min practice

2
11.2

Service Boundaries

Where services get cut — domain events, not CRUD tables — the 'bounded context' idea from DDD.

6 min practice

3
11.3

API Gateway in Microservices

The single entry point: routing, auth, rate limiting, and keeping clients independent of service topology.

6 min practice

4
11.4

Service Discovery

Finding a service instance by NAME, not IP: registry + heartbeats, or DNS-based resolution.

6 min 1 diagram practice

5
11.5

Configuration Management

Config that changes without redeploys: externalized, versioned, and environment-aware.

6 min practice

6
11.6

Synchronous Communication (REST/gRPC)

Request/response between services — the default, with gRPC as the high-performance option.

7 min 1 diagram practice

7
11.7

Asynchronous Communication (Kafka/Queue)

Fire events and let each service react: the decoupling engine behind microservices.

6 min practice

8
11.8

Circuit Breaker

When a dependency is failing, stop calling it — fail fast and let it recover. The Resilience4j pattern.

7 min 1 diagram 1 code practice

9

Topic 11.9 + 11.10 — Retry, Timeout

Timeouts bound how long a call may take; retries give it another chance — together they form the reliability primitive.

6 min practice

10
11.11

Bulkhead

Ships have sealed compartments so one leak can't sink the whole ship — same idea for call paths.

7 min 1 diagram practice

11
11.12

Distributed Transaction

One business operation spanning multiple services/DBs — where ACID dies and saga is born.

7 min 1 diagram practice

12
11.13

Saga

A distributed transaction as a sequence of local transactions with compensating actions — the industry answer.

7 min 1 diagram practice

13
11.14

Outbox Pattern

Guarantee the DB write and the event publish happen together — via a table that IS the queue.

7 min 1 diagram 1 code practice

14
11.15

Idempotency (again, now at fleet scale)

Idempotency applied to whole services: keys per logical operation, dedupe stores, and safe replays.

6 min practice

15
11.16

Distributed Locking

Mutual exclusion across machines: Redis SETNX, leases, fencing tokens, and the 'lock ≠ atomicity' lesson.

7 min 1 code practice